Festival de Lanaudière: To the Rhythm of Classical Music

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Renaud Loranger has been artistic director of the Lanaudière Festival since 2019. After a very promising first season, he and the team were preparing to relaunch the festival in 2020 and 2021 in a revised version. Of course, all their plans fell through because of the pandemic. As Loranger explains: “2022 is the first large-scale post-pandemic edition with guests from home and a little bit of everywhere else. This year is a kind of rebirth for everyone, I think, and we hope that the public will find its way back to the halls, the amphitheatre, the churches everywhere. I invite the public to take the time to come all the way to Joliette, to settle in this privileged space to really experience something extraordinary on a musical and human level.”

For this revival of the Lanaudière Festival, the public can expect the return of the great classics—among others, several concerts of the OSM conducted by Rafael Payare and several concerts of the OM conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. We will also find the festival’s regular musicians: Marc-André Hamelin, Charles-Richard Hamelin, the Violon du Roy conducted by Bernard Labadie for the first time in several years. Several artists will be making their first appearance at the festival, such as French pianist Alexandre Kantorow and William Christie and Les Arts Florissants. Also, there will be a substantial operatic component this year with the first act of the Valkyrie conducted by Nézet-Séguin at the very end of the festival and a major Rossini concert.

In addition, two important topics for Loranger will be highlighted during the festival. “All the reflection that I believe we must have on our place on the planet in relation to the issue of climate change and the disappearance of biodiversity is represented metaphorically by Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard. The other pole of my reflection is embodied in the July 29 program with the OSM performing Scriabin’s Prometheus and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé. These two works, which recall myths from antiquity, seem to me particularly relevant. On the one hand, we have Prometheus who burns himself by stealing the fire of the power of knowledge and who is punished for eternity; it is a beautiful metaphor on the development and our relationship to technology today. Then, Daphnis and Chloé makes us forget the tragedy of Prometheus and brings us back to a hedonistic, carefree society focused on pleasure.”

Loranger’s favorite is the work co-commissioned by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Lanaudière Festival for Samy Moussa, Elysium. “The work, which will also be presented on July 29, is the perfect cap to a program inspired by antiquity. Elysium is the idea of paradise, the ideal life, the dream life. This is the first time the festival has commissioned a work.”